


the body sleeping next to me

by evewithanapple



Category: Alias Grace (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 17:30:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17687816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: In their room in the Parkinsons’ house, Mary lingers.





	the body sleeping next to me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skazka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skazka/gifts).



In their room in the Parkinsons’ house, Mary lingers.

Her presence is as much in the things that lack as the things that remain: the warm body that no longer occupies her side of the bed, the silence which was once filled with the sound of her laughter, the chair where she had been accustomed to laying out her dress ever night – all empty, all missing. They’ve taken the old sheets and burned them, but Grace fancies she can still see the red bloodstains showing through the new bedding - the place where their mattress was scoured clean but the memory of what transpired still lingers. She wads up the sheets and blankets in the space where Mary had slept, trying to preserve the illusion of the other girl close by her side. If Jeremiah were here, she thinks, he could give her a real illusion – a Mary dancing in the moonlight, alive and happy again. If Jeremiah had been here when it all happened, he could have swept Mary away with him for a life on the road. It might not have been the farmhouse she dreamed of, but at least she would have been alive and provided for. If Jeremiah were here –

But Jeremiah is not here, and has not been for months. He is gone. Mary is gone. Grace is alone.

It is because of her loneliness that she at first dismisses the signs. If she told anyone, she knows, they’d dismiss it as the fantasy of a young girl already troubled in mind. Perhaps they would be right. After all, didn’t she fall into a faint for a full day after Mary died? Didn’t she wake insisting that _she_ was Mary, and Grace was gone? If she is going mad, it is something she wishes to keep to herself. No good can come of speaking of it.

And if she is going mad – if the touches she can feel on her face at night, the phantom voice calling _Grace, Grace_ in her ear, the white silhouette she glimpses out of the corner of her eye are all the products of a mind gone to rot – well, there are worse things. At least with Mary’s shadow presence, she doesn’t feel quite so lonely.

It’s not until George Parkinson begins to come to the door that she accepts that something more is at work than her own imagination. He rattles the doorknob, and she clutches her blanket against her chest, thinking both _no oh no please no, I don’t want you_ , and _Mary, is this how it was? Did he take from you without asking, or did you go to him willingly?_ Even if she had ever wanted him, she doesn’t want what was Mary’s. She doesn’t want secondhand affection; no more does she want Mary’s five dollars, or a coffin beside Mary’s in the cemetery.

Not yet, anyway. One day, when she’s old and gray, she thinks she might like to sleep beside Mary, as they used to. She knows it wouldn’t be permitted, with her a Catholic and Mary a Protestant, but perhaps she might convert. She thinks she wouldn’t mind so much. God has made no appearance in her life thus far, so she thinks He would not care, really, which church she worshipped at.

Every night, George is outside her door, and she gets no sleep. During the day, her sight blurs as she works, and she sees strange things – birds fly across her line of vision as she stands in the kitchen, specks of light dance on the walls of the cellar, the leaves and vines on the wall paper uncurl and stretch upwards. No one notices; no one ever pays enough attention to her to notice. She stays silent and waits for the final descent into hysteria.

One night, George comes to the door, and worse than ever. She thinks he must be drunk – he sounds like Father did in the bad old days. He alternates between rattling the doorknob, pounding on the door, and cursing her in slurring tones. She wishes someone would come – surely the other servants can hear him – but no one does. Sometimes it’s better not to hear, not to see.

There’s a thump, as though he’s thrown his shoulder against the door. It rattles in the frame, and Grace fancies she hears wood splinter. It cannot hold for much longer. Please, she prays, please God or Cook, or Mrs. Alderman Parkinson – whoever hears her, please come and stop him. Please, please.

There is another thump, but this one doesn’t come from the door. Grace turns in the bed in time to see the washstand lurch across the floor, sending her hairbrush and mirror clattering to the floor. Graces sits up in bed, pressing her back to the wall as she watches the washstand’s slow, thumping progress across the room, towards the door. Out in the hall, George seems to have realized that something is amiss. “Grace? Grace, what are you doing? Grace, open the – “

The washstand reaches the door and slams against it. The basin, which had slid to the very edge of the washstand over the course of its journey, finally teeters and falls over the edge, cracking in two neat halves as it lands on the floor. George is silent on the other side of the door. Grace doesn’t know if he has gone away, lapsed into unconsciousness, or simply stopped talking. It matters very little, either way; the washstand is wedged underneath the doorknob. He has no hope of opening the door tonight.

Grace gives her notice the next day.

* * *

 

In the room Grace shares with Jamie, Mary lingers.

Grace is a woman of means now – or at least, more than she was when she was only a servant girl with a handful of pennies to her name – and she fills the room accordingly. A silver-backed hairbrush on the dressing-table, her best Sunday dress hanging on the back of the wardrobe, scattered pieces of bric-a-brac on the bookshelf. There is no space for another woman here. Mary’s presence is not what it was at the Parkinsons’ – not a memory, but an intrusion. Her shade crowds behind the curtains, white linen fluttering in the night air, and Grace feels –

Not dread. Not quite. She remembers nothing of the séance with Jeremiah, but she was told of it afterwards; it repulsed her and thrilled her in equal measure, the idea of another person inhabiting her body. She wondered if it was how Mary felt in those last, hopeless days – if she could feel her baby pressing against her insides, crowding her out. Or if she had felt it even earlier, when she lay with the child’s father. Wasn’t that what the marriage bed meant, after all? Giving up one’s body to another’s possession?

She shares such a bed with Jamie now, and it is not such a trial. He is kind to her, gentle – conspicuously so. He is in love with his own goodness as much as he is in love with her, and he requires constant petting and reassurance from her to maintain it. It is far from the worst thing a man has ever demanded of her, especially considering what is offered in return. She endures.

She endures – and Mary watches. She can feel her presence in the hair that stands up on her arms, the electric charge of the air, like the moment before lightning strikes. She doesn’t know what lightning may strike here, if it does at all – what Mary wants, why she remains. Grace has already opened the window for her dozens of times, first at the Parkinsons’ and then at Mr. Kinnear’s. If she stays on, it is because she wishes to.

“Why?” Grace asks the empty room. She receives no reply but the gentle sway of the shutters. “Why haven’t you passed, Mary?” She pauses. “Haven’t you had enough? Haven’t I _given_ you enough?”

Nearly half her life in either prison or the asylum; was that what Mary bargained for, when her spirit clung to Grace’s form in the first, chaotic days after she died? She could have attached herself to Mrs. Alderman Parkinson and lived a shadow life as a society matron, which almost certainly would have bored her stiff. Or she could have clung to Nancy Montgomery, been the mistress of a wealthy farmer – and played the whole tragedy out again. Does she remain by Grace’s side because she lacks a better option? Or is there something else that binds them tight?

“It’s unseasonably warm today,” Jamie announces as he comes in, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “May as well leave the windows open tonight. We’ll smother, otherwise.” Grace follows his directive in silence. She just put new pink curtains in the week before, and she likes to see the fabric float in the breeze.

 The heat does nothing to dim Jamie’s ardour; after her now-customary recitation of the asylum’s horrors, he takes her to bed. She lies spread-eagled beneath him, patiently enduring his thrusts until he reaches completion and rolls off. She is grateful to no longer share his body heat, and as soon as he begins to snore, she shifts herself to the far side of the bed and pushes the quilt aside. Outside, thunder rumbles; the heat is evidently a preamble to a storm. Her eyes are drawn to the window, where her new curtains hang limp in the still air and apple blossoms are beginning to bud on the tree outside. She thinks of another night long ago, when she peeled an apple and asked her fortune, and Mary told her of the farmer she would one day wed. She smiles a little at the memory –

\- and the window swings shut with a _click_.

 


End file.
